Saturday, 4 June 2016

I read a mailing list that outlines the reason why Debian unstable still has a Eclipse version that is 4 years old. No one has been able to package it up fully and maintain it since version 3.8 of Eclipse. The latest version of eclipse is 4.5 (Mars)
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681726

Then I thought that I have never built Eclipse from scratch previously. I wondered how hard it would be.

Thankfully they have made it easy by using a git repo that has a list of sub modules. Everything you need is in the platform aggregator repo.

By follow Section 13.4 in this tutorial you can build Eclipse 4.x. Previously the build was done differently. The new way to build is with Tycho.
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipsePlatformDevelopment/article.html

Run this command and you will see the GIT project is made up of all other projects that together form the Eclipse Java Develop Tool IDE.